Elevate Black Friday and Cyber Monday Plans To The Next Level!

Elevate Black Friday and Cyber Monday Plans To The Next Level!

Tuesday, September 11, 2018Lauren Macdonald
For many merchants and online sellers, the looming rush of Black Friday/Cyber Monday can be daunting. Is your site ready for the rush? Do you have a solid returns process in place?

It’s hard to know where to begin.

I recently asked some of our fantastic eBridge Connections partners (i.e. web agencies and eCommerce solution providers) for their top Black Friday/Cyber Monday tips for merchants.

EYStudios

Shipping

Create a shipping calendar for the holidays that clearly communicates “order by” dates to guarantee arrival for the holidays. Not only do we recommend merchants having a holiday- specific shipping page, but also to clearly showcase your shipping calendar on your homepage, interior and checkout pages.

Making it as easy as possible for your customers to complete a transaction will not only increases conversions, but leaves the customer feeling gratified their purchase will be received in time for the holiday season.

ShipStation

Offer Hassle-Free Returns

The rush of customers flooding your site during the holiday season should be exciting for you and your customers. Make their shopping experience more enjoyable by providing an exclusive, free return policy. This will serve to lessen the number of abandoned shopping carts and will consequently enhance sales. ShipStation offers a branded returns portal to shift this unfortunate situation into a brand new sales opportunity. With customers returning to your site to submit a return, your company will have another chance to attract the customer for a different purchase.

ShipStation leads the e-commerce world with their web-based software designed to make e-commerce retailers exceptionally efficient at processing, fulfilling, and shipping their orders from all the most popular marketplaces and shopping carts using all the top carriers. Learn more on how to ease shipping and returns with ShipStation!

Zehner

Have a Customer-Centric Approach

“Maintaining a strong focus on the user experience is a key differentiator for eCommerce retailers on Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is a critical shopping event providing a valuable opportunity for brands to introduce their ethos and product offering to an influx of new customers. Dedication to information architecture strategy and experience design improves the user journey in terms of wayfinding, brand consideration and communicating key information necessary to increase conversions.” – Matthew Zehner, Founder / CEO at Zehner.

Zehner is a full-service creative digital agency specializing in eCommerce. Learn more about them here.

Bold Commerce

Optimize your Checkout

You'll see an influx of impulse buyers on BFCM, who want to order quickly and efficiently. Make sure your checkout clears the way for an easy, pain-free checkout experience. One way to ensure there are no holdups is to offer a one-page checkout and several different forms of payment, so customers can checkout the way they know and trust. Using Bold Cashier, you have the choice of creating a sleek one-page or multipage checkout that matches your branding, offer multiple types of payment gateways, accept payment in different currencies and so much more! Get started with Cashier today!

Bold Commerce build apps for the Shopify eCommerce platform. Their apps are designed to increase your sales and help you run your online store more efficiently so you can spend time on more important things, like growing your business. Learn more about Bold here

Jasper PIM

Ensure accurate Product Information:

“Providing accurate product information and fueling personalized shopping experiences across every store and sales channel is a huge challenge for every online merchant, especially during peak sales periods.

Product information and promotions not only have to be consistent and correct everywhere, but it also must be catered to your target audience in order to best result in a sale.

Here is a simplified example:

A product is designated to be pushed to your USA store with geo-specific assignments including; English description, US currency, local photography, specific PDFs, and so on. However, this same product must show up on your Brazilian store with a Portuguese description, price displayed in Real, with customized creative assets, and any other supporting information that may best resonate with that target audience.

Although this geo-specific strategy is essential to success throughout the entire year, it becomes more challenging to manage during sale peaks like Black Friday. Hard sale periods are when most merchants heavily rely on attracting customers with promotions. Balancing promotional launches (e.g, web pages, banners, ads, updating product information, pricing changes, etc.) across every custom storefront and each sale channel is a tough balancing act, especially for mid-market and enterprise businesses.

In order to succeed in getting the right product information into the right channels in an efficient manner, companies are investing in Product Information Management (PIM) solutions. A PIM centralizes all product information into a single source of truth for your entire commerce technology stack and allows you to bulk update prices, change descriptions, assign inventories, schedule publications and more.

In short, a PIM is one tool that syncs each business application and streamlines back-office product management with merchandising with front-end marketing. Your entire commerce workflow will be optimized for a better ROI. “

And there you have it!

Need a little help, our guide is m-packed with tips and tricks for speeding up order processing and automating data entry. It will aid your with all your integration needs for Blavk Friday and Cyber Monday.

“Integration has saved us at least 10 hours a week on just the fulfillment side. This new process has helped streamline the way our orders are inputted into Sage 100, and our team couldn’t be happier with the automation.
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Kyle Brandt, Wilson Electronics

“Life at Char-Griller is better now with eBridge integration.”

Nicholas Williams, Char-Griller

“If your business is at a point where you are doing a lot of manual data entry and you need automate processes, I would definitely recommend looking at eBridge Connections. Now that we have an integration solution in place, I can’t imagine operating without it.”

Eric Marquardt, LifeCORE Fitness

“So far so good. We are happy to see this [ShipStation integration] process up and running.”

Jason Barnell, DroneNerds

“eBridge's team understood what we needed and helped us every step of the way. They were always available for whatever we needed as we developed our new systems and helped bring us from idea to implementation to real world application. I would like to say thank you to the entire eBridge family for all the time and effort they put in to help us achieve our goals and highly recommend them to any business that sells online.”